Jackie Judson, vice president of marketing, and Jim Woo, a senior systems analyst, have been involved with Pine Valley Furniture’s Customer Tracking System since the beginning of the project. After receiving project approval from the Systems Priority Board, Jim and his project development team turned their attention toward analyzing the Customer Tracking System. 

During a Wednesday afternoon meeting, Jim and his project team members decide to utilize several requirements determination methods. Because the Customer Tracking System will facilitate the tracking of customer purchasing activity and help identify sales trends, various levels of end users will benefit from the new system. Therefore, the project team feels it is necessary to collect requirements from these potential end users. The project team will use interviews, observations, questionnaires, and JAD sessions as data-gathering tools.

Jim assigns you the task of interviewing Stacie Walker, a middle manager in the marketing department; Pauline McBride, a sales representative; and Tom Percy, assistant vice president of marketing. Tom is responsible for preparing the sales forecasts. In addition, Jim assigns Pete Polovich, a project team member, the task of organizing the upcoming JAD sessions.

a. Because Pete Polovich is organizing a JAD session for the first time, he would like to locate additional information about organizing and conducting a JAD session. Find information on JAD on the Web, and provide Pete with several recommendations for conducting and organizing a JAD session.

b. When conducting your interviews, what guidelines should you follow? 

c. As part of the requirements determination process, what business documents should be reviewed?

d. Is prototyping an appropriate requirements determination method for this project?